Meyer Lansky’s Off-Broadway Debut
By Nathan Burstein
He spent a long, blood-soaked career in the shadows, but Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky is finally taking center stage. “Lansky,” a one-man play about the infamous gangster, will begin previews January 23, in an off-Broadway production starring Mike Burstyn.
Dubbed the “financial wizard of organized crime” in his New York Times obituary, Lansky, who began his career on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was also a quiet Zionist and a would-be immigrant to Israel — details of his life that are generally obscured by his associations with such men as Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
Born in 1902 to religious Jews in what is now Poland, Lansky arrived in the United States as a child, entering the criminal underworld during Prohibition and generating a fortune from bootlegging, gunrunning and other business ventures not generally endorsed by the FBI. Fearful late in life that he could be sent to prison for his misdeeds, Lansky lived in Israel for nearly two years, hoping to use the country’s Law of Return for Jewish immigrants to gain citizenship and leave behind his American investigators.
Despite appearances, the immigration effort wasn’t merely a case of opportunism, Burstyn told The Shmooze. “The show is a fascinating portrait of a man who was in charge of a lot of evil,” Burstyn said, “but who, in his own way, quietly supported Israel in 1948, when the country was fighting the War of Independence. He managed to arrange arms shipments to Israel, and also to eliminate Arab arms shipments, because he and Lucky Luciano controlled the shipyards in New York at the time.”
Unrestrained when it came to ordering the assassination of adversaries, Lansky proved more generous in his dealings with Israel, reputedly having helped Golda Meir behind the scenes during a fundraising trip she took to the United States in 1948, Burstyn said.
In flashbacks, “Lansky” also calls attention to the gangster’s lesser known actions a decade earlier, when he gained a reputation for breaking up pro-Nazi rallies, and during World War II, when he partnered with the Office of Naval Intelligence to prevent German spying and sabotage in New York City’s shipyards. (The arrangement also played a role in securing Luciano’s early release from prison.)
Nevertheless, Burstyn said, “the play doesn’t pull any punches about the moral issues of what Lansky did.”
Although Jews and Italians at that time didn’t have the options of communities that were better established, most, Burstyn said, went the “straight and honest route” rather than the “quick and easy way.”
Burstyn added: “When Lansky died, the FBI agent in charge of [watching] him said he could have been the head of General Motors if he’d gone into legitimate business. He really had a brilliant mind — he kept all the books in his head, which is why they never could get him — but he took the easy way out.”
Advertisements
Advertisements
He was one of the biggest criminals in American. and he deserves Capital punishment not a story on Broadway. A Polish Jew born in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, Lansky immigrated with his parents to New York’s Lower East Side in 1911. By 1918 he and Bugsy Siegel were running a floating crap game and then graduated into highly lucrative auto theft and resale. In the course of the 1920s Lansky’s gang branched into burglaries, liquor smuggling, and other rackets and came under the aegis of crime boss Giuseppe Masseria. Lansky and Siegel had also developed a squad of professional murderers for hire, the prototype for the later Murder, Inc., headed by Louis Buchalter and Albert Anastasia. Lansky became a naturalized citizen in 1928. It was allegedly Lansky who persuaded Lucky Luciano to have Masseria assassinated in 1931 and loaned Bugsy Siegel for the purpose, making the four-man hit team representative of the major New York factions. Between 1932 and 1934 Lansky joined Luciano and Johnny Torrio, among others, in forming the national crime syndicate and became one of its major overseers and bankers, often laundering funds through foreign accounts. By 1936 Lansky had begun to develop gambling operations in Florida and New Orleans and also in Cuba, where he arranged payoffs to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also financed Bugsy Siegel’s casino developments in Las Vegas (and ordered Siegel’s execution in 1947, when Siegel welshed on the syndicate). When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, Lansky turned to the Bahamas, building casinos on Grand Bahama and Paradise islands in the 1960s after nurturing government cooperation. He also extended his gambling empire to other areas of the Caribbean and even across the Atlantic to London. He was also into narcotics smuggling, pornography, prostitution, labour racketeering, and extortion and had control of such legitimate enterprises as hotels, golf courses, and a meat-packing plant. Monies were secreted in Swiss banks. By 1970 his total holdings were estimated at $300,000,000. In 1970, fearing both a call to a grand jury and indictment for income-tax evasion, he fled to Israel, seeking to remain under the Law of Return; however, Israel eventually expelled him, and he ended up back in the United States facing several indictments. In 1973 he was convicted of grand jury contempt, a verdict overturned on appeal, but acquitted of income-tax evasion. Indictments on other charges were abandoned in 1974, partly because of his chronic ill health. In 1979 the House of Representatives Assassinations Committee, ending its two-year investigation of the Warren Commission report, linked Lansky with Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who killed presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Lansky died of lung cancer and was buried in Miami in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.
In 1947-1948 when the Haganah was able to secure a shipment of Czech arms but only with a bunch of cash payments, it was Lansky who came up with the money that made the difference. Whatever one says about Lansky, he delivered.
What's next...a play about the good side of the gangster Lepke? This fawning over Lansky should test one's gag reflex.
Here comes another Jewish hero:: B. Madoff. Standing by for a smash hit Broadway show.
" WE'RE BIGGER THAN US STEEL" !!!!
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.